AMERICAN CANAL BOAT. 45 



the friendly reminder of " No Admittance." The la- 

 dies consisted of two old, and one not young. One 

 young man, certainly the greatest lout I met with in 

 America, deeply buried in a coat of his father's, whose 

 skirts nearly swept the ground, almost liiding his too 

 scanty trowsers, and a hat so large that he was obhged 

 to keep shovmg it up from liis face, played the gallant 

 to them. These canal boats are very long and narrow, 

 decked over, and rismg about six feet above the water ; 

 ours was fitted up for the comfort, or rather discomfort 

 of the passengers. They are well provided with win- 

 dows, hold a number of people, and go very slowly; 

 ours in particular, drawn by two very quiet horses, 

 seemed to traverse the landscape at a snail's pace. 

 The canal is crossed by numerous low bridges, often 

 only a few inches above the deck, and one must be 

 constantly on the look-out not to be swept overboard, 

 a disaster I once happened to witness. Sometimes it 

 is necessary to Ue quite flat, a precaution which also 

 has its dangers, and on one occasion caused a dreadful 

 misfortune, when a passenger, by a boat that had very 

 little cargo, was horribly crushed to death between the 

 boat and the bridge. 



On a sudden we stopped with a tremendous crash. 

 Everybody jumped up to see what had happened ; our 

 boat was jammed with another in a narrow part of the 

 canal, directly under a bridge; and as ours was the 

 stoutest, she had broken some of the other's ribs. We 

 remained as immovably fixed as if we had been built 

 in; all attempts to drag the boat backwards were in 

 vain, because the horses, knee deep in mud, would not 

 pull together. At last, in a fit of compassion, and 



